in hands; and, after all, the favorite was imperfectly
curried. It was currently remarked that the cow had kicked the farm to
pieces--a rude metaphor, implying that the land was not properly
cultivated, nor the buildings and fences kept in adequate repair.

It was useless to remonstrate with my aunt: she would concede
everything, amending nothing. Her late husband had attempted to reform
the abuse in this manner, and had had the argument all his own way until
he had remonstrated himself into an early grave; and the funeral was
delayed all day, until a fresh undertaker could be procured, the one
originally engaged having confidingly undertaken to curry the cow at the
request of the widow.

Since that time my Aunt Patience had not been in the matrimonial market;
the love of that cow had usurped in her heart the place of a more
natural and profitable affection. But when she saw her seeds unsown, her
harvests ungarnered, her fences overtopped with rank brambles and her
meadows gorgeous with the towering Canada thistle she thought it best to
take a partner.

When it transpired that my Aunt Patience intended wedlock there was
intense popular excitement. Every adult single male became at once a
marrying man. The criminal statistics of Badger county show that in that
single year more marriages occurred than in any decade before or since.
But none of them was my aunt's. Men married their cooks, their
laundresses, their deceased wives' mothers, their enemies'
sisters--married whomsoever would wed; and any man who, by fair means or
courtship, could not obtain a wife went before a justice of the peace
and made an affidavit that he had some wives in Indiana. Such was the
fear of being married alive by my Aunt Patience.

Now, where my aunt's affection was concerned she was, as the reader will
have already surmised, a rather determined woman; and the extraordinary
marrying epidemic having left but one eligible male in all that county,
she had set her heart upon that one eligible male; then she went and
carted him to her home. He turned out to be a long Methodist parson,
named Huggins.

Aside from his unconscionable length, the Rev. Berosus Huggins was not
so bad a fellow, and was nobody's fool. He was, I suppose, the most
ill-favored mortal, however, in the whole northern half of
America--thin, angular, cadaverous of visage and solemn out of all
reason. He commonly wore a low-crowned black hat, set so far down upon
his head as p